Sylvia's Journal

My day was full of interruptions throwing my plan to write all day out of the window. First there was the gasman who came to deliver gas to Steve’s and Tessa’s place where the heat did not work. Despite a full tank he could not get it going. Luckily Axel did. Not having heat in something that is more like a camp in this weather is a serious matter.

Then there was physical therapy where my huge upperarm bruise created quite a stir and required the expert opinion of the chief PT. She declared I was lucky. I had not ripped a tendon (such a thing would have required a surgical intervention) but rather some fibers on the belly of the muscle. This explains why I can use my right arm but not lift anything heavy. She did suggest I see a doctor (which I did, another interruption), apply ice and keep my upper arm up (try it while you are standing or sitting). At the doctor’s office Gail, one of the nurse practitioners, had seen these kinds of bruises before and counseled patience and heat. I like the heat more so I follow her advice.

Two (planned) meetings-by-phone cut the day further into pieces and then it was five o’clock, officially ending my workday and just in time for the arrival of Nuha. We were ready to celebrate her 27th birthday. She came up by train from Boston and got to experience one last gasp of winter before she heads back to her desert home in May. Dressed in my red coat, like a cardinal, and with my camera she took off in the new (wet and heavy) snow to explore Lobster Cove in winter. “In Saudi Arabia,” she said breathlessly, when she returned, “we would call this snow like a girl who has not been married.” “Yes,” I replied, “that would be virgin snow. We use the same word.” Unmarried snow – I like it.

Nuha brought me a present and I had a gift for her. We are easy gifting objects because we both love scarves and so that is what we gave each other. Three scarves from Ethiopia for Nuha and one from Saudi Arabia for me plus a small vial of musk oil (promptly and expertly administered by Nuha behind my ears and on my wrists) and prayer beads that were selected to match the color of my eyes.

Axel had cooked a Surinam dish that had simmered all day in the slow cooker and required the making of roti, Indian bread we only knew from restaurants or ready-baked in the store. They came out alright but did smoke up the house so we had the windows open. This caused the candles on the birthday cake to go out on its way from the kitchen to the table, a chain reaction of unimportant events.

The cake with its pound of butter was yummy as long as you forgot about the butter; which Axel did but then regretted later as his stomach protested for hours afterwards.

I drove Nuha home to Cambridge with the remnants of the cake to feed to her brothers and friends. During our 45 minutes ride I learned much about how girls in Saudi Arabia find love, or at least a good match – quite a challenge, especially when you are a free spirit like Nuha. On my way back I listened to Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren who was telling us what we as taxpayers got for our 700 billion handout to the banks and companies like AIG: not much. The abuse she and her co panelists uncovered is maddening especially in light of the strict regulations we at MSH are held to when it comes to using public monies. If I don’t have a receipt for something that cost as little as 25 dollars I don’t get reimbursed. I wonder whether I should continue to believe in the basic goodness of people.

The last activity of the day was translating for Axel the last 3 weeks of Peter ‘s Zeur kalender captions. Some of these are impossible to convey in English, like the retro-curse ‘dekselse kwajongen!’ or ‘Flikker nou maar weer eens op!’ If anyone who reads this can help me, please! The many internet Dutch-English translators were stumped.

My major accomplishment yesterday was the removal of about 250 emails from my in-box. One could argue that, from a systems perspective, this is no accomplishment at all because many were simply transferred to other people in in-boxes, and thus only ‘shifted the burden.’ My other, minor, accomplishment was that Liz and I have stuck so far to our ‘next steps’ timeline for Ethiopia and pushed things along as planned (which is fast and against some odds).

Where I made no progress is on the travel calendar front. My counterparts do not, or cannot, plan this far ahead for reasons I do not know– two weeks for Ghana, five weeks for Afghanistan (or Ethiopia but no longer Zambia). I am all set to go to Ghana but the most critical person for the success of this trip has not responded to either plan A, plan B (or plan C which says ‘cancel.’). I know he has an iPhone but I know little about the strength of signals wherever he is. Signals from Afghanistan have been equally absent. One of the things I have learned over the years is to never make assumptions about reasons why I am not getting any responses and so I wait, with (e)ticket in hand and passport somewhere between Washington and Boston. There are still two weeks between now and my next scheduled departure.

I never left my house yesterday and spent too long sitting in front of computers, despite the granddog’s attempts to get me out. Today I will get out. Not just out but also up. My flying buddy Bill has planned a practice run north into NH, then west and then back to Beverly. The practice concerns landings, four of them, with full stops and maybe one go around, in Skyhaven, Concord, Jaffrey and our home base Beverly. Our timing appears to be perfect as the sky is blue and the temperature springlike.

Looking for a particular quote from Goethe about synchronicity, I found so many (synchronicity at work?) that I wondered whether I should not simply start to read all his books.

A number of encounters and coincidence have swarmed together this week and elevated me to a different space; a space from where I look down on myself and what is happening around me and I see, as if magnified, the swirls of good and bad and the few (very few) little eddies of calm of my surroundings.

Not knowing what is cause or effect I can only notice that some remarkable events have happened in the last few days; each one resonating with me much like strings resonate at their fundamental or overtone frequencies. [The metaphor is rich and enticing. Fundamental tones…? Overtones…? But first there is always the act of making sound, and the resulting melody.]

Part of the sound making yesterday came from Annabel who plays an instrument that is finely tuned with mine. I met her a few years ago through a colleague who introduced us. She is from South Africa and I now think we may have a common Boer ancestor, some desperate and/or enlightened spirit who traveled through Holland in the 1600s on his way to South Africa and possibly dropped a seed in the low lands.

She came to MSH yesterday for what we call a Brown Bag Lunch presentation, invited by my colleague who was sick and asked me to introduce her. So I googled her and read some of her most recent essays on ethics, leadership and change, topics of utmost importance to our work. She spoke to us about these topics and about adaptive work and the interconnectedness of systems, weaving a pattern that I recognized. It matched one I am weaving in my head as I am reading Otto Scharmer’s (Theory U) on my Kindle in the spare minutes that dot my day as I wait for this or that to start, to load, to begin. Did she resonate with my overtone or fundamental frequency?

Her talk also created some disharmony in the audience that painfully illustrated the points she was making – unnoticed by those who took it as a false note (her fault, not theirs). It reminded me of discussions after a concert with music too modern for some people’s ears. Not understanding, they criticize the composer rather than questioning their ears. It was one of those swirls that causes upheaval and kept me thinking about what I saw. Being both in the wild waters and above it, I was able to resist being swept away.

There were more Goethe quotes, and I saw (read?heard?) more of the fundamental tones. Who was this man who said things sometimes so deep, sometimes so funny? The Kindle allows me to satisfy my curiosity instantly for pennies – long dead authors are cheap. I download a few of his works, Faust, a biography, in under a minute. Now I have all this wisdom quite literally in my pocket. I think Kindle’s next frontier is to implant the technology in the brain for direct download onto neural paths (and duckboards).

I was pooped last night when I returned home but the day was not done. First there was the bone density scan; I am in that age category now and besides, the scan machine at the doctor’s office needs to be paid off. A quick interlude at home, eating leftovers while Tessa and her friend Cara cooked falafel, then off to a committee meeting of our Quaker community where Ken regaled us with stories of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, gambling, crime and dour Mennonites(joyless women in dresses with droopy flowers and men in straight and boring suits) trying to save the people from Sodom and Gomorra. We did our Quaker business wearing Mardi Gras necklasses and drinking herbal teas.

On my way home I chased, unwittingly and unwillingly a fearsome bunny that had emerged prematurely from its burrow. Its unusual presence on that cold night, amidst piles of snow and ice reminded me of my first encounter with Gwendalle, half Cherokee, half American, who told me, some 18 years ago, that chance encounters with animals are never chance. I consulted Jamie Shams’ Medicine Cards which tell me: “Here is the lesson. If you pulled Rabbit, stop talking about horrible things happening and get rid of “what if” in your vocabulary. This card may signal a time of worry about the future or of trying to exercise your control over that which is not yet in form – the future. Stop now! Write your fears down and be willing to feel them. Breathe into them, and feel them running through your body into Mother Earth as a give-away.”

From a website about superstitions related to rabbits, I learned otherwise however: “It is lucky to meet a hare, but unlucky to see it run across the path. Should it cross the path of a wayfarer from right to left, his journey will be disastrous; if it scuds along the way before him, the issue of his affairs will be doubtful for some time; but if it crosses from left to right it is a lucky token.” I am afraid it did not cross from left to right. I guess I better take Jamie Sams medicine.

My alarm is synchronized with the BBC report on the FESPACO (film) festival in Burkina. I listen to the daily report while taking my shower. I try to imagine what it would be like to be in Ouagadougou with tens of thousands of people trying to get into theatres that aren’t necessarily designed for crowds. Maybe they are now but when I was last there it was a small harmattan-dusted town with rattling taxis that held together with wires. I have never felt enticed to go there and witness this remarkable event. This morning an Ethiopian woman living in Ghana was interviewed, exactly the two countries I am in between now.

My dreams where full of symbols that would give a psychoanalyst a field day. Now I was on a train track in a car anxiously waiting for a train from the other side to pass me on the right track; then I was in Haarlem giving my car keys to a young American woman who did not know the city. At one point I took a short piece of red USB extension cable out of the hair of an old man. In the dream we all wondered where that came from, just as I now wonder what the dream symbol dictionary would have to say about this artifact of our time – connections through wires.

I drove home from work yesterday in the light. Spring is indeed coming. It is wonderful to arrive back home in daytime. The carriage house at the beginning of our driveway looked stunning in the late winter afternoon light; something it rarely does in its otherwise drab pale yellow color. I sat in the car in the driveway for awhile trying to figure out what will happen to this nice light at this specific time when we return to daylight savings time. I think it happens this weekend. This manipulation of time is something that I never can get my head around. It is as if those specific neural tracks in my brain are always temporary; shaky connections that are put in place twice a year and then removed to storage, like our duckboards. I have a similar thing with time zones when I travel to the Far East and back. It’s probably the same circuit.

I went to yoga class again after a two week absence. I am still unable to do any of the poses that twist my upper arm and shoulder. The balancing that I was so good at before the accident is now a real challenge; it used to be easy to do the Eagle pose but now my performance is dismal. Axel promptly recommended remedial action, as men are wont to do; I declined and wondered why I keep telling him things that will elicit advice when that is not what I am asking for. I have enough things to do like flossing and shoulder exercises and icing and feel guilty enough not doing all that. The icing is for my 3×3 inch deep purple bruise on my upper arm from the fall on Sunday and my rotator cuff tendonitis on the other side of the arm. The bruise is similar in color (but not in size) to the bruise after the accident that covered my entire upper right side of my body. It’s a beautiful plum color with yellow edges and brings back tons of memories of that intense time.

It’s amazing how quickly I am used again to the cold after the warmth of Ethiopia, a testimony to the adaptability of our systems. It was bitter cold when I got up yesterday before dawn and it took awhile for the car to heat up. But that is why we have winter clothes.

With a good, fast and reliable internet connection again I can take advantage of the many webcasts that are offered for free. In the last two days I ‘attended’ two of them. One was a lecture about a history of AIDS in the US which was fascinating in content; the other one was fascinating in process. The designers of the latter created a community of 100 plus people that produced three ‘poems’ together while exploring modes of working together that was based on Ralph Stacey’s Managing the Unknowable, all in one hour. At the end I was sad to log off. People from all over the world had signed in to this amazing interactive session about human systems dynamics and collaboration.

I celebrated the resilience of our species with two colleagues at the end of the day in a restaurant that comes with many memories, happy and sad, in Somerville. Alison was the reason for us getting together. She is on a sort of bereavement sabbatical as she deals with the emotional and organizational aftermath of her father’s passing. We toasted to deep friendships and ate comfort foods that our resilient bodies took in without any form of protest.

Back home I found the living room disassembled and the fireplace lying outside in the snow. It was a fireplace that was no good and that we had had much too long. We could never light a fire during a storm or even the slightest wind because it would smoke up the house and then we’d have to open all the doors and windows and the fire alarms would go off…..all very much the opposite of the kind of ambiance we were trying to create. It was also an energy-deficient, sucking heat out of the house through the chimney and cooling off the house overnight while heating the air around the chimney outside.

About one half year ago Axel had gone out to do research about green fireplaces and ordered one. We still don’t have it but now we are at a point of no return, with a hole in the wall, a chimney dismantled and our living room furniture under wraps; just when Alison gave me a bag full of beautiful lamb’s wool that she found in the parental house clean up. It is good for a huge knitting project that will last the rest of the winter (and maybe include the next). But such a project requires a functioning fireplace and so I cannot get started quite yet.

The snow day was a nice way of easing into work again, light work that is. Not quite the intensity of work (in between the massages) we did in Ethiopia. Axel and I both went to physical therapy with sympathetic right upper arm and shoulder pains – mine still accident related, Axel’s probably not but who’s to tell. We learned that everything is related to everything else. All the icepacks, so heavily used in the second half of 2007, then put away, are migrating back to the kitchen again.

The work included a half-hearted attempt to empty my mailbox in pursuit of the elusive objective of ‘zero mail.’ It is a nice idea but it needs constant upkeep. Once you are back to overflowing emails there is no advantage to having been successful before, no increased skill level. It’s all about discipline; or could it be obsessive-compulsive behavior?

This morning I got up at 4:30 again. Somehow the 8 hour time difference with Addis has disappeared like magic. I slept a full night, as I always do when home, full of irretrievable dreams, not unusual either, and was awoken by my alarm. I had forgotten how to turn it off, so Axel woke up as well.

During my absence Axel and our neighbor Bill from across the cove, who share a deep interest for finding artistic and architectural treasures related to Lobster Cove, poured over a Winslow Homer picture of our cove. It did not quite make it into his collection of masterworks as the critics called it a bit messy, but Axel and Bill liked it and now I want to know where it hangs. Imagine that, Winslow Homer was here!

Tessa and Steve stayed home for the snow day as well. That made for a quick disappearance of at least two of the three large pieces of cheese I brought back from Holland, one for each couple. I am guarding the one unopened package that is destined for Sita and Jim – we have to send it by mail as it may not make it if left here and Sita is off to London and then Cologne in a few days. I have never sent cheese by mail. I’d hate to lose it; real Dutch cheese is nearly as good as a Winslow Homer – if only we could get the real Dutch bread to go with it all would be perfect.

Coming home to a snowstorm is the best homecoming – as long as it starts after touchdown. We drove home from the airport in a light snow which turned into a veritable snowstorm sometime in the early hours of Monday, March 2. Everyone was advised to stay home, which we all happily did. I was grateful that our return from Amsterdam had not been today and wondered where the planes would be diverted to, if they left at all.

Back home I played with my new toy, a Kindle that had finally arrived and which should make packing reading material for my next trip so much easier – it can hold a 1000 books and the pages read like regular pages, not like a computer with a backlit screen. It’s an amazing technology that even allows switching from reading to ‘being read to’ if I were to get tired, with a choice of a male or female voice. I promptly started downloading multiple volumes of the Great Books of the world, all free of charge. That should keep me pleasantly occupied while waiting in airport lounges.

In the evening we went for dinner at the St. Johns as if it was just a regular day that had not started 8 hours earlier for me and about 6000 miles away. On the way to their front door I made a tumble on the ice that was hiding below a thin dusting of snow and managed to fall on my bad arm; the arm with the rotator cuff tendonitis that was already in bad shape from a wrong move as I pushed my suitcase out of my hotel room on Saturday night. I had iced it in the plane and it had finally calmed down and then the fall, requiring more ice and having Axel cut up my dinner.

When bedtime finally came around I barely noticed hitting the pillow. I woke up at my normal wake up time and resumed my life in the US, celebrating my safe return with breakfast in bed. We watched the mess on the roads on TV while sipping our Ethiopian coffee. Life is good!

The rest of the day I put away my travel gear, sorted through my emails and started organizing my next trip, three weeks from now to Ghana. The snowplow allowed for some diversion as did a call from my friend and former colleague Carol, the one who was supposed to meet my sister in Mali but didn’t – even though they flew back in the same plane. We had a lot of catching up to do – stories mostly about children and health.

Grand-dog Chicha loves snow storms, especially the aftermath, when looking for sticks in the deep snow makes it all the more exciting. When the snow melts we discover how excited she was when all the poops become visible that were so nicely dug under and covered up. Tessa and Steve then have to sweep the lawn with their poop removal implements while we watch and are glad it’s not our dog. Friends with grand children report similar sentiments.